Incorporating Swarm Intelligence Into Computer AI 64
An anonymous reader writes "From optimizing truck delivery routes to inspiring nerve-cell-based cognition models, ant intelligence has arrived. From the Economist: 'In 1992 Dr. Dorigo and his group began developing Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO), an algorithm that looks for solutions to a problem by simulating a group of ants wandering over an area and laying down pheromones. ACO proved good at solving travelling-salesman-type problems. Since then it has grown into a whole family of algorithms, which have been applied to many practical questions. ... Ant-like algorithms have also been applied to the problem of routing information through communication networks. Dr. Dorigo and Gianni Di Caro, another researcher at IDSIA, have developed AntNet, a routing protocol in which packets of information hop from node to node, leaving a trace that signals the "quality" of their trip as they do so. Other packets sniff the trails thus created and choose accordingly. In computer simulations and tests on small-scale networks, AntNet has been shown to outperform existing routing protocols."
Re:And this is different from OSPF how? (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, for one, ants don't do OSPF...
It's been many years since I read up on this, but here goes: Like pheromone, the traces decay, or "evaporate", over time. Yet the next packet deposits new pheromone. Do this a number of times over a number of paths through a number of nodes, and statistically the shortest path will accumulate the most pheromone, and hence the shortest path will "emerge" from the rest.
OSPF and hop counts are deterministic. This method is a lot more stochastic, and hence could be easier to scale it better to larger networks and problems like the TSP.
Another advantage is that each node stores simpler information (the pheromone level for neighbor-destination pairs) instead of the whole network topology. Further, if a node goes down, the next best path is also readily known (better reaction to failures was one of their selling points). Also, it's possible (but probably not advisable) to start sending data packets without any kind of initial routing setup, and let the ACO thing figure out the best path over time. A lot of these points are very useful for, say, ad hoc networks, even if they may not make much sense for the Internet.
It's been around for a while. Read up on it, it's pretty interesting... maybe starting with TFA.
Re:Yer kidding, right? (Score:1, Interesting)
- i think my brain just asploded.
That's because you were acting and not thinking.
Slightly more seriously, the above post acts as a nice illustration of the fact you can go on ranting about your own private brand of Cartesian dualism all you like, just so long as you're always allowed to shut down anyone talking to you by redefining terms every now and then.
In this case, it's done by trying to enforce a specific, private, and egocentric definition of "think". It's one of those irregular verbs: I think, you may or may not think, that non-anthropomorphic entity acts.
Personally I don't see that there can be any basis for subscribing to that kind of dualism (or any kind of dualism ever), unless you're religious of course. But don't let that stop you from having another rant -- after giving us yet another private definition of "think", of course.
Re:Yer kidding, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And this is different from OSPF how? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's very different. OSPF requires everyone to know the layout of the complete network. For mesh networks, OSPF is useless, it never converges. Attempts to amend OSPF to work for mesh networks have so far failed.
AntNet works quite badly, but it does get most of the traffic to its destination most of the time. That is a lot better than anyone else does.